Springtime in December

Hi All! Can you believe it's December 1st? 2015 is almost gone! Welcome to the Rose Blossom Blog Hop featuring Close To My Heart's December Stamp Of The Month: Candlelight Garden.

If you just hopped over from the oh-so-creative Shelly Nemitz's blog, Just One Pretty Piece, you are in the right place. If you're starting here, I have a list of the hop participants at the end of this post. Now, on to today's project.

It's been rather dreary here--rainy and cold--so I decided to perk things up with a little home decor piece. Let's take a look:

For this piece, I altered a little 5x5-inch wooden frame that I bought at my local craft store for $1. I covered the front of the frame with paper from Close To My Heart's Zoe paper pack. (The green and white polka dots are so cheerful!) I covered the center of the frame with White Daisy cardstock and masked of the area where my mason jar was going to be. I then blended Glacier and Sorbet inks with my sponge daubers, starting on the mask and them moving outward to make sure the blending was soft. I used the same mask to create a mason jar shaker pocket using my fuse tool and a flip flap. I initially thought I would stamp the jar onto the pocket itself, but the StāzOn ink didn't actually stay on very well, so I stamped the jar onto the White Daisy piece using Black Archival ink. I added some heart glitter by Martha Stewart to my pocket and sealed it up. I set my pocket aside and stamped the flowers in the jar using Champagne ink.

For the flowers and hearts, I did some no line watercoloring. First, I stamped the everything in Champaign ink. (Whisper might work as well.) Then I painted everything with watercolors, being sure to go over the lines so that the lines blended in with the paint. I also made sure to paint the stems of the flowers that are in the jar. I then added my jar pocket. I added part of the flowers and leaves to the edge of the jar inside the frame with dimensional adhesive. I then added the rest of the flowers to the frame using matte medium. While the flowers were drying, I painted the hearts and added them to the sentiment that I had created by stamping in Black Archival ink and heat embossing with clear embossing powder. I popped the sentiment up with dimensional adhesive and then covered the adhesive with the hearts. I added a few gold glitter hearts from the Fundamentals Gold Assortment for a bit of bling. I then added a bit of Glacier extra thick twine to the jar and some iridescent shimmer to the flowers and the hearts.

Here are some close-ups:

And here is the cheerful little piece once again:

I hope you enjoyed my bit of spring. Now hop on over and see what the always-inspiring Morgan Vogt has for you today at TweetScraps. And if you get lost along the way, here's a list of participants:

Brenda

Lynn

Shelly

Kim {that's me!}

Morgan

Cathy

Kristine

Kim

Margot

Have a wonderfully creative day!